How the Trump administration is trying to change the way people vote

Amna Nawaz:

In recent days, the Justice Department has sued eight states to compel them to share their voter registration lists with the federal government. Those lists include voters' personal data, like dates of birth and Social Security numbers. State officials oppose the move because of concerns about how the information will be used.

That comes as President Trump continues to target election systems, including mail-in ballots.

Liz Landers is back now with a closer look.

Liz Landers:

Trump's targeting of mail-in voting is just one action he's been critical of.

To discuss more, I'm joined by David Becker, the executive director of the nonpartisan Nonprofit Center for Election Innovation and Research.

David, thank you so much for joining us.

The Department of Justice announced that they are suing after the state refused to turn over voter registration lists. The Department of Justice sent us a statement and said in part that Congress gave the Justice Department authority under statutes, and they list out a few of these, to ensure that states have proper voter registration procedures and programs to maintain clean voter rolls containing only eligible voters in federal elections.

Do the states have the ability to refuse to send this information over?

David Becker, Executive Director, Center for Election Innovation and Research: So, first of all, the National Voter Registration Act and the Help America Vote Act, which are two of the statutes that they cite, do in fact require and authorize the states to engage in list maintenance, voter list maintenance, to keep their voter lists up to date.

But those responsibilities reside with the states and the states alone. What the Justice Department can do — and I know this because I worked for seven years as a lawyer in the Justice Department enforcing these statutes — is, they can say to states, you have to have a program that does these things, that removes voters who have died, removes voters who have moved away.

But it doesn't enable the Justice Department to seize that authority from the states and do it for the states when they don't want to. Another big factor here is that a lot of this data is highly sensitive, data like driver's license numbers, Social Security numbers and dates of birth, which are the holy trinity of identity theft.

And states have very significant regulations to protect that data from disclosure. Remember, the federal government, it was revealed, just uploaded a huge amount of data from the Social Security database to a vulnerable public cloud server. So the states have a very good reason to want to protect their data and get more answers from the DOJ that the DOJ has not provided.

It has not been clear what they're going to do with this data, how they're going to store this data, who's going to have access to this data.

Liz Landers:

In a separate action that the Department of Justice is taking, they sent a request back in August to access voting machines, specifically Dominion Voting Systems that were used in the 2020 election in two counties in Missouri.

Neither of these county election officials have complied to turn over these voting machines. Does the Department of Justice have input on voting machines and maintaining the actual physical infrastructure for voting?

David Becker:

With rare exception, the DOJ has absolutely no authority over voting machines. They might have some authority to ensure that the voting process is accessible to, for instance, people with disabilities or people who don't speak English very well. That's in the Voting Rights Act.

But, in general, they have no authority to seize or inspect voting machines in any way. And the way that this was done in states like Missouri — there's also allegations this was done in Colorado — is, it appears they went through some kind of third party to try to twist arms with local election officials and get access to those devices.

It's even more troubling because there is federal law that requires these local election officials to maintain custody. Chain of custody is very important with voting machines. And if they — if that chain of custody is destroyed, it could render those machines unusable in the next election.

So there's no clear indication, again, what the DOJ is doing, whether it has any competence whatsoever to look at voting machines, and absolutely no federal statute that authorizes them to do that.

Liz Landers:

I want to play for you a sound bite from President Trump last month talking about mail-in ballots. Let's listen.

Donald Trump, President of the United States: Mail-in ballots are corrupt. Mail-in ballots, you can never have a real democracy with mail-in ballots. And we, as a Republican Party, are going to do everything possible that we get rid of mail-in ballots.

Liz Landers:

The president has repeatedly attacked mail-in ballots and that form of voting. Are mail-in ballots secure?

David Becker:

Well, we have had mail-in ballots, mail-in voting, since at least the Civil War, so for over 150 years.

And, in fact, the states that started making it more popular, extending it to more people often tended to be redder states, states like Arizona, Utah, who were thinking about voters who might be older, who might be in rural areas, who needed to find ways to vote. It's absolutely secure. Every state has multiple protections in place on the voter registration side, once the ballots come back in, to check to see the signatures are matching and the right person is voting.

And, also, if anyone ever tried to vote a ballot there wasn't theirs, it's likely they're going to — that person's going to show up. And so there will be protections in place to make sure mail voting is secure.

Liz Landers:

To the point that you were just making, there are 36 states that allow no-excuse absentee voting, including several that are almost entirely vote-by-mail. President Trump won 20 of those.

Does the president have the power to get rid of this kind of voting?

David Becker:

No, the founders were very wise when they constructed the Constitution. Remember, they had just defeated a tyrant in England and achieved their freedom here in the United States.

And one of the things they were really worried about was that a future despot, a future authoritarian would try to seize power through some kind of populism or something like that. And so they decentralized the running of elections through something called the Elections Clause of the Constitution, which says that the time, place and manner of elections is regulated by the state legislatures.

Congress can also regulate it, of course, Congress being made up by the states. But the White House, the president, plays absolutely no role on elections. And if the president wants to change anything with regard to federal elections, he, of course, has to go through Congress to do that.

Liz Landers:

David Becker, thank you so much.

David Becker:

Thank you, Liz.